European city tourism experiences constant growth

Published on : Wednesday, January 2, 2019

The 14th edition of the European Cities Marketing Benchmarking Report has the crucial figures from around 126 European cities and offers benchmarking insight into bednights collected from Europe’s main markets besides analyses of city tourism in comparison to national tourism, bed supply, occupancy, and tourism densities.

In general, the ECM report mentions that the cities included in the report attained an average growth rate of 7.4% in the previous report period of 2016-2017. International bednights increased 7.6% while domestic bednights grew 4.8% during the same period. The growth in the international bednights is due to the increase in the main source markets, particularly Russia (+26.7%), China (+16.5%), and the United States (+15.5%).

Top Performing Cities

Also, the growth in terms of bednights is related to the increase rate of top performing cities. Of these top performing cities, three of them (Amsterdam, Istanbul, and Munich) showed a boost of more than 10%, followed by Lisbon (+9.8%) and Paris (+9.3%).

To quote European Cities Marketing President, “The past five years have shown a positive average annual growth rate of bednights in both the ECM report’s cities (+7.5%) as well as among the EU28 nations (+4.7%). European cities have continued to demonstrate faster growth rates than EU28 nations, which once again proves the importance of city tourism.

This 14th edition of the ECM Benchmarking Report provides a vital perspective on the volume of urban tourism in Europe, enabling individual city destinations to chart trends and to benchmark themselves in terms of volume and other parameters, especially key source markets. It presents compelling evidence of the economic significance of contemporary urban tourism. Cities are the dominant geographical focus of European tourism, especially the lucrative (and therefore much sought after!) short break and congress and/or convention’s segments.”